Nimitz: Three Japanese Mistakes at Pearl Harbor

Nimitz: Three Japanese Mistakes at Pearl Harbor

I received this email today from a good friend, looked around for this topic and was surprised it wasn't here, so I'm posting it. It details what Admiral Nimitz said after touring the destruction at Pearl Harbor: "The Japanese made three of the
biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make or God was taking care
of America." I did some research and it comes up on many sites. The quote is attributed to the book, "Nimitz: Reflections on Pearl Harbor". Amazon site says the book is currently not available, so perhaps someone on the forum can confirm.

Sunday, December 7th, 1941--Admiral Chester
Nimitz was attending a concert in Washington D.C. He was paged and told
there was a phone call for him. When he answered the phone, it was
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the phone. He told Admiral Nimitz
that he (Nimitz) would now be the Commander of the Pacific Fleet.
Admiral Nimitz flew to Hawaii to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. He
landed at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, 1941. There was such a spirit
of despair, dejection and defeat--you would have thought the Japanese
had already won the war.

On Christmas Day, 1941, Adm. Nimitz was given a boat tour of the
destruction wrought on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. Big sunken
battleships and navy vessels cluttered the waters every where you
looked. As the tour boat returned to dock, the young helmsman of the
boat asked, "Well Admiral, what do you think after seeing all this
destruction?" Admiral Nimitz's reply shocked everyone within the sound
of his voice. Admiral Nimitz said, "The Japanese made three of the
biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make or God was taking care
of America. Which do you think it was?" Shocked and surprised, the young
helmsman asked, "What do mean by saying the Japanese made the three
biggest mistakes an attack force ever made?" Nimitz explained. :

Mistake number one: the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of
every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same
ships had been lured to sea and been sunk--we would have lost 38,000 men
instead of 3,800.

Mistake number two: when the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in
a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never
once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed
our dry docks, we would have had to tow everyone of those ships to
America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and
can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can
have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to
America. And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.

Mistake number three: every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war
is in top of the ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill.
One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel
supply. That's why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes
an attack force could make or God was taking care of America.

Admiral Nimitz was able
to see a silver lining in a situation and circumstance where everyone
else saw only despair and defeatism. President Roosevelt had chosen the
right man for the right job. We desperately needed a leader that could see silver linings in the midst of the clouds of dejection, despair and defeat.

Yamamoto claimed it would allow the Japanese to run wild in the western Pacific for six months. Yet even at best according to the US war plans the US would not be able to go onto the offensive or even significant defensive action in the Western Pacific for at least six months. This was because the US did not have the tankers, transports, supply ships, landing ships or Army/Marine forces to conduct such operations for at least six months.

So bombing Pearl Harbor changed little about the war except to get the American public firmly behind the war.

Here's an article about oil logisitics. It's been hotly debated here and on other forums just how easy or hard it would be to knock out the oil tank farm or otherwise deprive the Pacific Fleet of oil. One thing is that I think there were some commerical tank farms around Honolulu not just at Pearl Harbor ,another is that the early operations in the Pacific basically operated on a shoestring . In other words the early Pacific Raidscould have taken place anyways.
IMHO you could add mistake #4 which again IMHO trumps the 3 you listed just don't bomb Pearl Harbor the Pacific Fleet wasn't going anywhere near the Western Pacific simply because it lacked the logisitical train it needed to power project there.

Vincenzo wrote:
imho misataken number one is not a mistaken, can you find the full pacific flet on the sea? i think noand it's not true that 9 man on 10 where ashore

Yes I wondered about this too. Its much easier to find and sink an un manned stationary ship tied up in a harbor , than finding it and fighting at sea.

"Prince Louis Battenberg is burning the Admiralty lights down low
Silently sifting through papers sealed with a crown.
Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more Dreadnoughts.
The houses in Hackney are all falling down. "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZECqVDmfCI

I have never been on a commissioned US Navy ship with less then 1/5th the crew on board and that was cold iron with no boilers or generators running and this was starting in the 1970’s after the Navy had relaxed a lot of rules.

None of the BB's tied up at Pearl Harbor had shore power or shore steam so they would have at least had one boiler and generator and all the usual aux equipment running . I really doubt the 9/10th story, I bet they were in 3 section duty at best which would have had 1/3 on board, 1/3 having returned for duty by the morning and at most 1/3 off duty and I bet most of the junior people in the last 1/3 did not have permission to stay overnight off ship. Its also not payday night so I bet many were short on money and slept on board.

A summarized statement of Navy personnel actually on board ship at the
beginning of the attack is as follows:

On board
Commanding officers of battleships .................. 5 out of 8.
Commanding officers of cruisers ..................... 6 out of 7.
Commanding officers of destroyers ................... 63 percent.
Damage control officers of battleships .............. 6 out of 8.

There were ample personnel present and ready to man all naval shore
installations.

In the case of the Army, a summary report compiled by the Adjutant
General of the Hawaiian Department indicates that at least 85 percent of
the officers and men were present with their units at 8 a. m., December
7.

I have also read that expedients - such as commercial tankers modified slightly to equip them with additional pumps, manifolds, and hoses that would allow them to serve as mobile tank farms - were deemed feasible.

jim 1 wrote:I have also read that expedients - such as commercial tankers modified slightly to equip them with additional pumps, manifolds, and hoses that would allow them to serve as mobile tank farms - were deemed feasible.

According to Silverstone's "US Warships of World War Two" the US captured 8 Italaian & a couple of German oilers post Pearl Harbor so maybe these could have been used as so-called station tankers which were used for fuel storage where speed and mobility wasn't required.

The idea of converting tankers to 'mobile tank farms' didn't go very far. The Navy commandeered one elderly tanker, the J C Donnell, and renamed her USS Pasig (AO-89) with the intention of using her as a floating storage facility at Noumea. However, during the time the conversion was going on it proved feasible and much cheaper to use concrete barges for the purpose, so Pasig was sold off.

jim 1 wrote:
Not sure how quickly concrete barges could get to PH in 12/41.

Couldn't they just make them their?

"Prince Louis Battenberg is burning the Admiralty lights down low
Silently sifting through papers sealed with a crown.
Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more Dreadnoughts.
The houses in Hackney are all falling down. "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZECqVDmfCI